Lumen Touch
A Master at school redesign and using forward thinking technology to Connect Students to Leadership

Dr. John Vandewalle, a medical and pharmaceutical professional, entered the entrepreneurship world because of his passion for education and technology. In 2011, Vandewalle acquired Lumen Touch, a company that supplies software solutions to schools and school districts to manage the whole student and make the administration tasks in a school district seamless. As the CEO of Lumen Touch, he and the LumenTouch team, decided to adopt a market changing approach using technology to improve education. “In the beginning, it was an entrepreneurial challenge for me, but now it has become more of a personal mission on how we can use good leadership and technology to transform an extant education model, says Vandewalle. In keeping students at the center of the company mission, we developed a student and school management system that allows schools and districts to create a secure learning and management environment while freeing up no-productive administration resources.

Lumen Touch offers student-centric platform with their array of solutions such as Bright STUDENT – student information, Bright LEARNING – learning management, Bright CARE – health record including behavioral and dental health, Bright SUCCESS – student e-portfolio, Bright INSIGHT – full dashboarding platform and many other modules making up their Bright SUITE.

Today the news is filled with titles addressing schools being hacked, teachers on strike because of severe work demands, bullying issues, high costs of assessments and software, and so on. Vandewalle’s company takes many of these headaches and day-to-day challenges out of the lives of teachers, administrators and technology directors by bringing a single platform to the table which is extremely cost effective and hassle free. In general most customers usually buy software solutions from many different providers and in some cases this may be 30 to 40 to fulfill all the functionality that Bright SUITE offers. Lumen Touch integrates all of the backend and connects to other vendor applications to provide dashboards and measurements to the different stakeholders within the school district community in a just-in-time manner on the device of choice. Lumen Touch also provides data to students’ phones and other technology accessible to them, so that they can be empowered to manage their progress and their futures. Students can see their own performance every minute of the day and do not depend on anyone else to analyze their potential. Teachers and parents can also keep track of the performance of students in real time, on any device.

On the administrator’s side, leaders can gather information from different aspects of the school district such as utilities, buildings, building maintenance, and library system, and collate all the data into a single dashboard.

In the beginning, it was an entrepreneurial challenge for me, but now it has become more of a personal mission on how we can use good leadership and technology to transform an extant education model

Lumen Touch then distributes it back out to the school district, so that they can check their performance in every area of interest and against their key performance indicators. In this way, interactive data dashboards make the once hectic and tedious work structured and productive while removing the day-to-day frustrations.

Lumen Touch’s Bright SUITE includes modules for compiling student information, curriculum management, special education management, library management, health management, Medicaid billing and college and career planning. Based on the requirement of school districts, the company integrates single or multiple modules with the applications that school districts are using. The company also works at the state level to support the state departments of education, supplying the data meeting their requirements and streamlining the whole data flow from the source to the end-user, i.e. from students to the state. The company makes sure that the student data in their system is secure, by creating safe environment encryption on the front and the backend of their systems. All system demands regarding interoperability, redundancy and security are addressed on an ongoing basis with a very high level of priority while they practice the “white glove” approach for customer service as supported by customers being with them for 10 years and longer in different States. We do not have a base of clients, but rather a collection of strategic partners that we value every day realizing the mission our schools on to create good citizens and an educated work force.

Aiming to spread its footprint across all 50 states the company is helping school districts in the technological and leadership transformation journey by redesigning their schools and districts to drive better outcomes and improve the holistic well being of students and our future. We are continuously searching for new solutions to bring a broader solution to education in the 50 States and then to other countries. Lumen Touch is currently integrating artificial intelligence and looking at Blockchain as new applications so you may soon see Alexa in schools.